Identifying Literary Devices

Similes, Metaphors, and Personification

A simile is a comparison between two unlike things using like or as. 

Example:  The car looks like a garbage can on wheels. 

A metaphor is a comparison between two unlike things without using like or as. 

Example:  The car is a garbage can on wheels. 

Personification is a literary device which gives human characteristics to objects.

Example:  The motor whined when I turned the key. 

The following sentences contain literary devices that Gary Paulsen employs in Dogsong.  Print out this exercise, and then carefully read each sentence and identify the literary device--S for simile, M for metaphor, and P for personification.  Finally, underline the words that helped you make your decision.  See examples above.  (6.66 points each)

  1. They were the same sounds he had always heard, sounds he used to listen for.  Now in the small government house--sixteen by twenty--they grated like the ends of a broken bone. 
  2. "Dogs are like white people," Oogruk said.
  3. The bear was a tower, a white-yellow tower standing over the loose dog.
  4. The darkness came harder and the northern lights danced and he rested.
  5. He [Russel] was the mammoth.
  6. With the weight of the parka and pants wet, he would go down like a stone.
  7. "They [the dogs] ran for me like the wind."
  8. A smile cut his lips and made them bleed.
  9. Soon everything glistened with ice, even the dogs looked like jewels running ahead of him in the dark with the ice frozen on their backs.
  10. The bear was a mountain of meat.
  11. They wanted to stop, twice the leader did stop, but Russel used words as a whip and drove them.
  12. "Some of my memory is like my eyes, dead and gone."
  13. Great gray sides twitching, they [the dogs] stood like shadows, with wide heads and heavy triangular jaws.
  14. The lance entered like the light, like a beam of light shot into the mammoth and when there should have been death the animal instead wheeled and heaved in a great circle, caught the dogs and threw two of them in the air.
  15. So Russel ran the team and now the land was so flat that it seemed to rise around him like a great lamp bowl sloping up to the sky.

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